The Meaning of Sex
by Marty Klein, Ph.D.

Sex has no intrinsic Meaning.

Almost everyone wishes it
did.

The desire to give sex meaning
is an understandable, important enterprise. Honestly approached, it can
be a valuable exercise; disguised as the righteous desire to simply appreciate
the meaning sex has, or as the pursuit of restoring sex's "true" meaning,
it is a common source of conflict for both individuals and society.

Sex only has meaning insofar
as we experience it. Its meaning is emergent, not objective. We discover
the meaning of sex each time we are sexual, meaning that only resides in
our experience. The meaning of sex changes--is reinvented--each time we
are sexual.

Most people need sex to have
meaning because the alternative is too frightening: being sexual in an
existential vacuum. Sex without meaning would require participants to float
freely in sexual experience, rather than being snugly anchored in a cognitive
framework.

This is scary because of
our indoctrination that sex is bad. We learn that we need protection from
our sexuality: its non-linear, open-ended nature, its cacophony of impulses
and feelings, its transcendent possibility of taking us away from ourselves.
We might not, after all, make it back.

Because sex is ultimately
grounded in the body, it is a right-brain, non-linear experience, not a
left-brain, cognitive one. Of course, sex can be analyzed, evaluated, and
so on, but not as part of the experience. Having sex and understanding
sex are two separate activities, much like eating and understanding nutrition
are two separate activities. Trying to understand nutrition or digestion
while eating undermines the sensuality and enjoyment offered by the experience
of dining.

"Sex" is not limited to intercourse;
not even limited, in fact, to genital activities. In reality, "sex" describes
a huge range of activities. This is half of a dialectic: many things can
be sex because sex has whatever meaning we experience moment by moment;
and sex has an infinite range of meanings because the scope of activities
that can properly be called sexual is so vast.

People who believe they know
the objective meaning of sex can easily say what sex is and what it isn't.
Their dichotomy is clear, the sexual side predictably narrow. That's one
reason such people can be so self-righteous about what humans should and
should not do sexually.

"Intimacy," for example,
is a common rallying point for people who need sex to have Meaning. "Intimacy"
(which, of course, means radically different things to different people)
is fine. But setting it up as a standard for "healthy" sexuality creates
a hierarchy of sexual experiences, downplaying or even excluding many of
its most important aspects.

This must be true regardless
of the particular meaning people decide sex "really" has. In this sense,
Christianity and other sex-negative institutions are not the only source
of sexual repression in our culture. Rigidity about sexual experience,
meaning, and decision-making is the true culprit.

Organized Humanism, for example,
stands opposed to religious concepts of sex being inherently evil. But
to the extent that Humanism is attempting to discover some secular "true
meaning" of sex, it colludes with society's conceptual rigidity. Ultimately,
it is different from other sexual dogmas only in content.

With the perspective that
sex has only emergent meaning, we can experience a huge range of sexual
feelings and meanings. With a different perspective, much of this range
is either invisible, or worse, repugnant and, by definition, excluded.

Sexuality, for example, has
a dark side. One can deal with this in many ways, but an experience-based
model of sexuality does not judge this fact. Instead it accepts it, makes
room for it, plays with it or not, but always respects it.

If, however, one believes
sex has a revealed meaning--say, it must always "nurture a relationship"--then
there's no room in the model for sex to have a dark side. One has to deny
that it's there, and say it reflects a perverse mind, weed it out, destroy
it--because its existence threatens the model of what sex should be. This
is a primary source of censorship and other repressive movements.

The fact that sex has no
intrinsic meaning is, actually, its ultimate positive quality. It gives
us the opportunity to discover an
infinite number of meanings in sex, and to use sex as a vehicle for
self-exploration. And it gives us the chance to play, in the purest sense
of the word.

But the fact that sex has
no meaning is scary. It means that every time you're sexual you're adrift.
It means you have to take responsibility for your choices and experiences.
If you believe that sex is dangerous, of course, or if you believe that
sex is so powerful that it can destroy you, this is a terrifying prospect.

Sex's lack of meaning is
also scary because it means partners are not subject to our control, or
accountable to objective criteria. It means we have no authority to tell
a partner, "you're obviously wrong for what you like or do sexually, so
you should want what I want--sex the 'right way.'"

Sex having no meaning requires
that we trust ourselves when being sexual. First, it means making choices
from a vast array of options. Will we make good choices? Choices that reveal
things about us we're defended against? This is far worse than simply being
exposed as having lust in your heart. Will we be attracted to activities
that "good people" are not? Will our choices hurt our partner, our family,
our country?

Second, we have to trust
sex. Will it take us so far out that we can't come back? Will we have our
eyes put out by its brightness or darkness? It's like reaching into the
back of a cave without knowing what's back there. It takes courage.

Third, we have to trust our
partner. Can s/he handle whatever we create sexually? Can s/he go to new
sexual vistas with us as we invent them, or will we find ourselves alone?
Will s/he go further or faster than we do, also leaving us feeling alone?
In reality, sex is almost always an experience of oscillation: of partners
being alone and then finding each other, again and again. Can we tolerate
being parallel and then coming together, then splitting up again moments
later, trusting that we'll find our way back toward each other?

Finally, we have to trust
that we're adequate--that is, that our body will respond to whatever challenge
sex presents. In reality, that's redundant, because sex only exists in
the body, and so it can't present challenges our body can't handle. In
this sense, losing an erection, for example, is a perfect response to whatever
is going on at the moment. Only if we have a particular, arbitrary standard
for our body's behavior is a lost erection problematic.

Many troubling behaviors
reflect how badly people wish sex to have meaning. To sustain the illusion
that it does, for example, society is willing to persecute some members
through laws regulating consensual sexual behavior or preventing sex education.
This is why people are invested in others' sexuality--because it feels
dangerous to have alternative models of
sexuality floating around. In this sense, the desire for sex to have
meaning makes society a theocracy, with the government, organized religion,
and media its priesthood.

This wish for sexual meaning
is also behind the common desire for special rules to govern sexual behavior
and decision-making. This is an example of the wish, as Fromm called
it, to escape from freedom: to avoid taking responsibility for the complex
and (it feels) dangerous richness of our sexuality.

Ecstatic sexuality--that
is, body-centered instead of mind-controlled--is possible only if we let
go of socially-constructed,
allegedly ontological boundaries of sex. People fear this is the same
thing as letting go of ethical boundaries, which is not true. Ethical boundaries
regarding sexuality do not require some arbitrary, objective ontological
boundaries being imposed on the sexual body and mind.

Progressive people should
be vigorously developing a dialogue that addresses sexuality's ecstatic
nature through a non-moralistic, non-dogmatic exploration. We should be
helping people understand sexuality in its mysterious yet non-mystical,
meaningful (emergent) yet not Meaningful (objective), sacred yet non-Religious
grandeur.

Ironically, the sanctified
meaning that people want sex to have blocks access to the very transcendent
qualities they claim they desire. By confronting this personal and social
reification, we could give people a chance to have the profound sexual
experiences whose possibilities are wired into both the human body and
the mind's capacity to bond with others.

So is sex meaningless? Yes
and no. It is meaningless in the objective or philosophic sense. But it
is meaningful on the personal, experiential level. One reason that people
engage in sex is to be periodically renewed, nourished in their experience
of whatever kind of meaning they expect--whether that meaning involves
intimacy, closeness, pleasure, creativity, bodily perfection, or the promise
that life is OK.

The desire to pretend that
sex has meaning is understandable. It indicates a desire to be grounded,
to depend on something. But developmentally, we all have to get off the
floor and walk, even though it seems so terribly high up there, and the
floor seems so terribly hard, and falling is so terribly scary.

As with all fears, how we
respond to this one is a clear statement of where we are. Pretending we
don't have this fear is immature, and it prevents us from moving forward.
Acknowledging this fear is a prerequisite for constructing a mature universe.

So we need to deal with this
fear by confronting it: by looking sex straight in the eye of its deep,
black maw, and walking straight in--whistling a happy tune, if necessary
--trusting sex and ourselves, knowing that the worst thing that can happen
is merely that we'll have an experience we don't want to repeat.

Because we can't learn to
walk without falling a few times. The question is, what's more important--learning
how to walk, or preventing a few bumps along the way?